The return of the Patriot press

The first newspaper to publish the text of the Declaration of Inde­pendence was The Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 6, 1776. In the following months, 29 of the 37 Colonial newspapers then operating at least alluded to it. For example, the Virginia Gazette reported on Aug. 10 that when it was read aloud in Richmond to several hundred “respectable freeholders of Henrico county, and upwards of 200 militia it was received with universal shouts of joy, and re-echoed by three vollies of small arms” followed by “many patriotic toasts.”

After that, however, few newspapers took much notice of the nation’s founding manifesto. As a political document, the declaration is a stunning achievement. But American militias had already been at open war with British forces for more than a year. The declaration articulated why they were fighting, yes, but it only mattered if they won.

While coverage of the declaration was subdued, newspapers themselves had a huge effect on the course of the American Revolution. Many historians believe that the real revolution occurred in the decade before 1776, before a single shot was fired, when newspaper coverage of key events and ideas helped transform loyal British subjects into fiery American Patriots.

Now, 250 years later, Revolutionary-style journalism is back.

NEWSPAPERS FIRED some of the first salvos of the American Revolution following the Stamp Act of 1765. The steep tax on paper was designed to replenish British coffers badly depleted by the Seven Years’ War with France and its Indian allies in North America. The act was a disaster for printers, who promptly denounced it as tyrannical. The British repealed it the following year, but it provoked the printers into open opposition against the Crown. And because American Colonials were avid readers in perhaps the most literate society in the world, in attacking the act newspapers prepared the way for even more radical political ideas to spread across the culture.

At the time, Colonial newspapers were generally produced by printers. Britain had some full-time newspaper editors, but in America newspapers were usually a less-than-lucrative sideline to printers’ primary business producing books, pamphlets, and government documents. A few employed freelance correspondents, but the job of “reporter” didn’t emerge in America until the 1800s. Printers typically filled their four-page papers with whatever crossed their desks, from official documents to private letters to reports from other newspapers.

And Colonials, including printers, would have been baffled by modern ideas about “journalistic objectivity.” That American invention first appeared in the early 1900s. Colonial news­papers hoped to be factually accurate and bragged about offering the “freshest advices.” But balance? Neutrality? How could one not take sides in the war between justice and tyranny?

Colonial newspapers had interpreted the Seven Years’ War in both theological and political terms as between French ­popery and Christian England. They defined battles either by the atrocities of the Catholic French (“hen-hearted, cowardly dogs”) or the heroics of the fine Anglican British lads and officers. So when the Stamp Act appeared in 1765, printers didn’t hold back. No journalistic standard required them to present “both sides” when King George was obviously the villain.

Colonial printers took this same approach describing the 1770 Boston Massacre. On March 5, an angry confrontation between a handful of British troops and hundreds of furious Bostonians got out of hand. After some in the crowd began swinging clubs and a cutlass, the soldiers fired, killing three, mortally wounding two more, and injuring six others.

Newspaper accounts portrayed the event as a bloodbath, the inevitable result of a standing army quartered close to a city. Well over half of the narrative in the March 12, 1770, Boston Gazette recounted as the cause of the incident a vicious and cowardly lot of armed troops bullying innocent boys and respectable, unarmed citizenry. The page included several black coffins for emphasis.

At the climax, according to the Gazette, “the Captain commanded them to fire; and more snow balls coming, he again said, damn you, fire, be the consequence what it will!” The paper continued: “But what showed a degree of cruelty unknown to British troops, at least since the house of Hanover has directed their operation, was an attempt to fire upon or push with their bayonets the persons who undertook to remove the slain and wounded!”

An account in the South Carolina Gazette called it a “horrid massacre.” It began, “Tuesday morning presented a most shocking scene, the blood of our fellow citizens running like water through King Street and the merchants Exchange.”

The stories were influential, overheated, and factually doubtful. Some witnesses and the commanding officer later denied he had ordered the soldiers to fire. At the trial that fall, six of the soldiers were acquitted, and two were found guilty of manslaughter but merely branded on the thumb and released—an oddly restrained verdict for a supposedly vicious “bloodbath.”

RELIGION AND POLITICS were at the time increasingly intertwined. The revolutionary “ideology of dissent” linked religious tyranny with civil tyranny, making the Church of England a political threat just as French Catholicism had been 10 years earlier. As historian Edmund Morgan has noted, Revolutionary-era Colonials read history in a way that “attributed the rise and fall of empires to the acquisition and loss of the same virtues that God had demanded of the founders of New England.”

This same concern for virtue appears in coverage of the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord, the skirmishes that opened the Revolutionary War. On April 19, the British military governor of Massachusetts sent out 700 troops to destroy the Colonials’ military stores at Concord. He had hoped to surprise the Colonials, but a body of militia was waiting at Lexington Green.

As the British attempted to surround and disarm the Americans, who were dispersing, a shot rang out. The redcoat lines then opened fire, killing eight militiamen and wounding 10. The British soon retreated, but the Colonials sniped from behind walls and trees at the exposed British lines all the way back to Boston.

Patriot accounts of the battle, however, focused on alleged British duplicity and atrocities. “The late frequent Marchings and Countermarchings into the Country, were calculated to conceal the most cruel and inhuman design, and imagining they had laid Suspicion asleep, they pitched upon Wednesday Night for their Execution,” said the May 1 New York Gazette.

During the battle, the British committed “Cruelties and Barbarity never equalled by the Savages of America.” The story continued: “In one House a Woman and seven children were slaughtered. … It is no time now to dally, or be merely neutral, he that is not for us is against us, and ought to be the First of our Resentment.” The son of a Tory who had guided the British troops was captured and shot, “a Death too honorable for such a Villain!”

God was on their side, it continued: “In every Struggle Heaven has as yet given us Strength equal to the Day, its hand is not shortened, nor its Arm weakened. … God who transplanted us hither, will support us.”

A minority of newspapers remained Loyalist, or tried to, but in most places that wasn’t easy. In Patriot-controlled areas, many Loyalist printers suffered threats and attacks as mobs smashed presses, broke up printing rooms, and occasionally assaulted the printers themselves. “Sir,” began one letter, “if you print or suffer to be printed in your press anything against the rights and liberties of America … death and destruction, ruin and perdition, shall be your portion. Signed by Order of the Committee of Tarring and Feathering.”

Loyalist printers were often ready to print both sides of an argument, a practice Patriot mobs discouraged and Patriot printers regarded with contempt. To a true Patriot, to print both sides was simply to propagate error and support the enemy.

Both American and British leaders saw newspapers as vital to winning the hearts of the public, as media historians David Sloan and Julie Williams wrote in their 1994 book, The Early American Press: “They expected their press to behave accordingly. News reports in the Revolution, therefore, were certainly never meant to contain mere factual coverage or to describe battles and events objectively. Instead, coverage of news was a deliberate, highly valued attempt to paint the two sides in their most persuasive colors.”

For Patriot printers, press freedom meant the freedom to print that which supported the Revolution. Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, once explained that when newspapers abuse their freedom and sow dissension, “ought not that government, upon the plain principles of self-preservation to silence, by its own authority, such a daring violator of its peace, and tear from its bosom the ­serpent that would sting it to death?”

The war itself was hard on the press and on printers. Simply operating was difficult, given the challenge of collecting news, an uncertain postal system, economic and military instability, bad roads, and a shortage of newsprint, among other troubles. At the start of the war there were 37 newspapers in the colonies but only 35 at the end of the Revolution in 1783. Including the 33 new papers founded during the war, 70 published at one time or another but half of them folded.

THE NEWS INDUSTRY has seen major changes in the last 250 years, but the style of Revolutionary papers still echoes across today’s media landscape. Take the once-venerated Washington Post, the paper that broke the Watergate scandal. It announced in February that it cut about a third of its reporters and editors, over 300 people, perhaps the most dramatic sign to date of the mainstream news media’s economic woes.

Commentators pointed to Post owner Jeff Bezos’ attempts to broaden the paper’s appeal. When Amazon’s founder bought the paper in 2013, most conservative readers had already abandoned it as relentlessly liberal. The paper cemented that reputation with its 2017 slogan aimed at the Trump administration but absent in the Obama years: “Democracy dies in darkness.” When, in an effort to moderate its image, the paper declined to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris in the last election and then tried to balance its op-ed pages, its progressive base revolted. In Revolutionary terms, it tried to act like a Loyalist paper with a Patriot audience.

This happens across the political spectrum, often in language that mirrors Patriot rhetoric. A paid subscriber to the Substack newsletter Unreported Truths explained that he was canceling because he was tired of the author’s attempt to be an “objective” journalist: “We are in a war of good versus evil. Nobody is perfect, including Trump, but Dems and Media are pure evil. Trump is our last Hope. He needs full support of those fighting evil.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that people today want news that attempts to persuade, to serve a larger purpose. The professional ideal of “journalistic objectivity” that produces “unbiased” news is not inherent to journalism; rather, it’s a century-long American experiment that is now winding down. It didn’t appear until after World War I, when ideas that had floated around journalism for decades coalesced into a package of professional standards and practices: accuracy, balance, fairness, nonpartisanship, and detachment. By midcentury, this paradigm dominated newsrooms.

At its best, journalistic objectivity helped newspapers deliver credible news across political and cultural lines and so become very profitable. At its worst, it pretended that facts could be delivered free of interpretation, “without bias,” allowing journalists to hide their true political and ideological commitments under a veneer of neutrality.

But the news industry’s commitment to objectivity collapsed with its finances over the last four decades. It happened, in Hemingway’s phrase, “gradually, then suddenly.” There were several factors, but one major one was how the internet devastated the news industry’s ad-supported business model. Some publications chased after fragmented audiences with clickbait, and others abandoned pretensions to fairness and nonpartisanship. Social media fueled political polarization, forcing news publications like the Post to take sides.

All this left the door open for an explosion of online sources and the rise of news “influencers” who, self-consciously or not, take on the role of Revolutionary journalists. The stakes in today’s political and cultural battles are different but just as real as in 1776. The public square is again infused with religious fervor. People like Tucker Carlson attract huge audiences in part by saying: “You can trust me because you know me, and you know our cause is just.” In a chaotic culture where change is constant, the stakes so high, and truth so elusive, that’s an appealing pitch.

Where the journalism industry goes from here is far from certain. After the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, hundreds of newspapers sprang up across the country to form what came to be known as the Party Press. Federalist and Republican editors heaped vitriol on political opponents and their ideas, but in general both groups shared the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Newspapers helped forge a new nation under that broad consensus. American culture currently lacks that sort of shared purpose; without one, the news media industry will probably remain thoroughly revolutionary.

—Les Sillars is associate dean of academic affairs and professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College, and former editor-in-chief of WORLD